Country and How to Get There

March 20, 2007 Temporary travel away from the city is not the same thing as living permanently away from it. But it taught me one essential fact. It showed me the difference between living inland and living on the coast and how, no matter the coast’s cooler winds in summer, no matter the closeness of the sound of the waves, my preference was not for the pocket suburbs of brick veneer houses which now litter and uglify hundreds of kilometres of Australia’s eastern seaboard. This experiment had to do with knowing something about the drier inland environment in detail, with acquiring practical expertise about that environment. In my own mind, it was a matter of knowing something more about natural proportions at work in that non-coastal environment, between ways to live and a sense of locale.

Europeans of course would see this move as little more than a decision to live in the country. But this way of thinking about it sits rather oddly in Australia. At one level, of course, a phrase like living in the country is just words and there is no need to bother too much about their semantics. At another level, however, this phrase’s retention of a European or American connotation is jolting and inappropriate. “In the country” is a phrase more apposite to a 19th century novelist like Turgenev where the student children return to the parents’ country estate or it might apply to the division between town and country in a place like Britain. These are usages which I parody in choosing the title ‘A Month in the Country’ for a poem in The Kangaroo Farm.

The antipodean use of the word ‘country’ is not about a settled patchwork landscape of town and farms. After all, very little of Australia resembles that sort of physical geography. Instead, the Australian use of the word ‘country’ is technical, intimate and surprisingly mystical. You can own country, you can lament it, you can feel attached to it, you can hate it, you can feel that it is yours in a blood sense. But you cannot be ‘in’ the country in the sense of being in the countryside. Australian ‘country’ is, in short, not the countryside which Europeans invented but a new sort of amalgam equally derived from pastoral uses of land, from a reckoning of the sheer scale of Australia and its relative absence of population, and from Aboriginal ancestral senses of custodianship. ‘Country’, accordingly, references many sorts of terrain, whether a parcel of land or a huge stretch driven through for days on end; while, on other occasions, it is a term closer in meaning to the sense of a birthright or a home area. In this latter context, the word’s use oscillates between how an Aboriginal Australian might use it to describe where he or she comes from, to the self-consciously academic adoption of the term as a tool to shift perceptions of ownership and environment within the larger geopolitical terrain of national life and ideas. It is word which upsets the neat overlaps of meaning in terms like ‘land’, ‘property’, ‘farm’, ‘home’, ‘district’, ‘landscape’, separating out these meanings from each other and stressing how each brings with it its own non-indigenous colonial history.

The issues involved here, mainly of land and identity, are also inevitably some of poetry’s core issues, articulating a matter deeply set in our national psyche: namely what sort of poetry typifies our idea of local experience. It is the case that some writers prefer to take the round-the-world ticket route to universality, writing poetry which looks as though it has been written anywhere where American TV is the staple diet. Recent Australian poetry has no more and no less of this featureless worldspeak than the rest of the English speaking world’s poetries have. However, what constitutes the opposite of this blandness — namely, the representation of local aspects of voice and tone — is itself far from clear. It is too easy and too reductive to take the rural Australian voice as the local touchstone. For is this rural voice a more foundational poetic voice than any other? Why should it be? And, besides, is there only one country voice, let alone only one national voice? The truth is that poetic voice is not reducible to a regional consideration or a sociological descriptor. Judith Wright, for example, wrote poetry of the land more profound than any of her contemporaries, but in many ways her poetry speaks largely without regional inflection. Inflection is not what makes it Australian.

The fact is that poetry is more than a matter of voice and colloquial phrasing. No less crucial to poetry is its capacity to identify, and in that sense to localise, what we have always noticed but never seen. In memorable poems, names occur for what has familiarly pressed upon the senses in a manner seemingly between names or on the edge of language. More than voice, this ability to find the right word is why, at its most pleasurable, poetry maintains a natural access to what is local, what is specific and striking. Good poetry keeps the channels with the local world open, flowing and fresh. Likewise we at once know that something is going wrong in a poem as soon as we sense that the project — the scope of imagining, the way things are placed in the poem — is detached from any living context. This is most obvious when, for instance, the themes and styles of a particular poet’s work are generated only from the repertoire of good ideas. These days that tends to mean a poetry originated from the debris of various earlier kinds of modernism whether surrealism of various sorts, the mannerisms of American poetry or the generalised pressure in post-modern poetry towards de-referenced language. Shards and fragments of various 20th century literary movements, these borrowed flashes of modernity can bring moments of fire and insight. But their thoughtless deployment in contemporary work has rapidly deluded many a young poet into believing that clever, look-alike, derivative poems can somehow be a substitute for the real thing.

The line or phrase which breaks through like a suddenly recognisable signal is the one where the thing and the space it is in quickly and brilliantly merge in the eye and on the ear. This moment of convergence, a moment where things at last fit appropriately into their environment, seems to happen in good poetry as if in a single movement. The fineness of Les Murray’s poetry, for instance, is often to do with such moments. Sometimes these places of convergence occur in images carefully pointed up in a way which highlights their newness; at other times, convergence occurs with an utter naturalness of phrase. One of Murray’s many definitions of ‘sprawl’ in his poem ‘The Quality of Sprawl’, for instance, demonstrates this latter natural, understated manner in which Murray seems effortlessly to get things right.
‘Sprawl’ he writes,

 . . . is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly . . .

The phrase perfectly defines a particularly Australian perception of how to connect up outback immensity and practicality. How else could you farm other than by plane? But it does so in a line nearly offhand in delivery and calculatedly indifferent to the sheer extravagance of the idea: this is what produces the comic effect of the tacked-on word ‘roughly’. In other examples, however, Murray highlights the effect more deliberately, letting us know that he is conscious of the specificity (and newness) of what he is seeing. Thus for instance, the well-known opening of ‘The Flying-Fox Dreaming, Wingham Brush, New South Wales’ (Murray, 1977) with its reference to the way evening light, spread along the landscape’s flat ridges, seems to filter sideways through open-limbed eucalypts and how

  . . . the west
is lighting in under the leaves
and Hookfoot the eagle
has gone from over the forest . . .

Here a reader can immediately sense the flickering effect of the light, a flickering effect carried by the deliberately cumbersome phrase “lighting in under . . . . ” Something is said here in a moment of visual and emotional convergence in a way which is deft, Australian and unforgettable. If you have seen this beautiful peculiarity of Australian dusk light you know that Murray’s poem speaks it completely.

In other places, it is as if his metaphor is, like someone watching, taking its time to focus, squint, size up and take in the object. When reading this last sort of line the reader will think, re-think and then assess the aptness of the phrasing as if being made conscious of taking time to see a newly defined phenomenon freshly. The opening line of ‘Equanimity’ (Murray, 1983) is a good example of this delaying tactic or focussing device. Here the poem starts off with the line:

Nests of golden porridge shattered in the silky-oak trees . . .

It takes a while longer to gauge how Murray is identifying the deep burnish of these native trees’ flower clusters. Anyone who has seen them knows that they are not elegant spired flowers or rich mists of blooms. But are they ‘porridge’ exactly? The phrase ‘golden porridge’ is both shocking and insightful. For indeed silky-oaks form thick, irregular, randomly scattered clusters of orange-brown, sometimes almost bark-coloured flowers. The ‘porridge’ effect with its trace of splatter inevitably stays in the mind. In one and the same moment, the image reveals both the tentativeness and then the security with which the poet’s focus realises these unconventionally beautiful flowers.

Murray’s poems often have an outstanding ability to size up and then think through a moment of perception, extending what he sees and how he senses into this naming-game as if the process of seeing and feeling is at once naturally contoured both by thought and thing. In ‘Grassfire Stanzas’ (Murray, 1983), Murray describes how the paddocks get burnt off in late winter, leaving “black centres” expanding on the afternoon paddock. Already everything in that phrase about expanding black centres bespeaks the winter light, the airy immensity of the paddock slopes, the softening light falling on grey-blond dry grass. Then he goes on:

The blackenings are balanced, on a gradient of dryness
in the almost-still air, between dying thinly away
and stripping the whole countryside. Joining, they never gain
more than they lose. They spread away from their high moments.

The effect is magical. The reader can watch the movement of fire across ground as if it is a perfect emanation of balance and re-composure — as if indeed there is a physical internalisation of upsurge and rejoining in the motion of these low barriers of flames.

This ability to gauge the intuitive connections between thought and object is close to what I was aiming at in my earlier use of that shorthand phrase about a lived sense of locale where there is a play of natural proportions between things and their environment. Murray works with that knowledge abundantly. Other poets have this gift too and it can be found in contexts where very large things are in focus and not only, as in the examples from Murray’s poems, where the fine specifics of light through trees or of flames in burn-offs are what the poet is focussed on. This natural relatedness is found, for instance, in poetry where suddenly the relatedness between what are immeasurable dimensions — and, in particular, dimensions influenced by entirely personal senses of the world — are caught in a series of poetic interconnections. This is, for example, what occurs in David Campbell’s account of the relation between train tracks and the skyline in his poem ‘The Wimmera’ (Campbell, 1989). In this poem:

Steel lines melt
Into the rim of the horizon
Where plain and sky are welded
And at intervals shimmer
Along the tracks like bins
The silver temples of Ceres
In whose shadow tractors crawl
Over the floor of the plain
As mortal as men
Before the vast seasons
Brown green and blond
That move as slow as
Fairweather cumulus
Over tin towns and temporary houses
And the sky fits
The walls of the horizon
Like a silver lid.

Seen at different levels of closeness and farness many objects criss-cross and merge here. What surrounds these small townships with their metal-roofed houses and their gleaming wheat silos is a mobile impression of immensely open flat country. Campbell’s poem maintains a set of immeasurable relations between height and width, between smallness and largeness as elements which are themselves vectoring in a movement relative to each other — as they indeed they do when you are crossing such country. Here, utterance and seeing have such an intuitive join between them that it is not just a place (a silo, a township) which holds in the mind’s eye but a whole modality of being in, and moving in, this inland place. The effect is almost cinematic or somewhat like the driver’s eye view of land.

Perhaps it is inland places which allow for these mobile relationships between height and depth. Thus Philip Hodgins captures a more static, a more purely photographic version of a similarly immeasurable quality of empty sky and height and distance in his poem ‘A Note from Mindi Station’ (Hodgins, 2000). Under another inland skyscape, he writes of how isolation can seem quite ‘reasonable’ (his phrase) and how in that space

  . . . a sparrow hawk was hovering there.
Its legs had been let down with claws outstretched,
the wings had worked themselves into a blur,
the head was changing settings like a switch;
but what was fixed in place was one small bird
which might have been the pivot of the world . . .

This time what intuitively links perception with its natural context is not only a sense of geometry in the bird’s hovering but also an intensely felt identification with height and aerial viewpoint which you develop in this kind of large, flat country. Which way do height and depth pivot here? Hodgins seems able both to look up at the hawk, and at the same time, to look down across the land from the bird’s position.

Other Australian poets have taken this physical sense of experience into a more self-reflexive idea about how poetic imagery and language can work. Jennifer Rankin, especially in her poems about what she calls “the line” and poems about flying, comes to mind. These are poems pre-occupied with the experience of earth and with horizontal shapes. A true poet, she knew many painters, a fact which no doubt influenced her poetry’s technical range and its overt identification with the flat pictorial space of then contemporary abstract and abstract-expressionist painting. Reading her work, it is as if she is finding a literary accommodation to the way that much Australian painting adopts, and then changes, flat abstract and minimalist surfaces into a figure which offers a particularly appropriate way of seeing Australia. These revisions of late modernist pictorial space open a way to see grain, texture and the minuteness of things when dwarfed by the air. In similar fashion her poems draw our attention to the minutiae of natural phenomena and to the need to find names for visual and auditory effects which otherwise remain unconscious and nameless influences. She lets us see what is at the edge of vision.

Was moving away from the city my own way of encouraging intuitive influences of time, land form and season to be at work on my sense of the world around me? If so, then it has to be said in the same breath that the processes of poetry are paradoxical and cannot be willed even by the best of designs. What is at issue in a poem is not just the intention to see things newly but also the ability to accept and find words for convergences and connections which seem to hover on the edge of understanding. The place where I am writing this essay, for instance, appears at first sight to be a place in the wilderness. Once you know about it, however, you cannot forget a detail like the one mentioned before: several hundred metres away is the line of one of surveyor Mitchell’s early 19th Century projects, the Great North Road. In the sense that the road placed a European structure and a European concept of travel across this country, you could even say that it was the road which brought ‘wilderness’ to this place, for it brought what we mean by the concept of untravelled country. It set wildness and impenetrability apart from and at each side of its culverts and bridges and stone paved embankments.

As architecture it also symbolises, however, that common feature of colonial Australia, the futility and unpredictability of assuming that you can plan and map out the future. More or less the year it was finished, river-worthy steamships started plying the seacoast Hunter Valley to Sydney route much faster than pack horses and drays could make this dramatically mountainous, expertly surveyed inland way. No doubt the road briefly assisted the first influx of wheat farmers with road transport, but their farms are long gone and wheat has not been grown here for a century or more. The truth is that the appearance of the land has been utterly transformed. The small, shallow lake which the house looks down towards once had the largest flour-mill outside of Sydney on its shores. Not a single trace of it, not even a foundation stone or a declivity on the land marks its position now.

The fact of so much already non-existent, so much already vanished, could indeed suggest that country inevitably demands that we understand the relationship between openness, wilderness, habitation and travel as a series of transformative experiences of place — across time, for example, and through multiple senses of environment and place. Intuitively acquired senses of time, land-form and weather cannot help but be historical, particularly when they are to do with recognising detailed micro-structures of recurrence and variation in rain or season or animal and bird movement. Is it, as the Aboriginal story teller has told us, that we must dig deeper than the white soil of the surface and try to find the black soil inside it? “You been diggin only white soil . . . ” is how this custodian put it (see note below). Even the multiple layering and transformation of European settlement is, in this sense, only white soil. To come back to the valley, for instance, it takes a while before you understand one of its most obvious features: the convergence of two part-flowing creeks in a patch of water folded into the hills is clearly a dreaming, an increase site. Of course once you look, the whole area is dotted with paintings and rock carvings. There are so many of them that you would have to be dim-witted indeed not to reflect on the dispossession which occurred here when permanent settlement and farming took on. That knowledge clarifies what might be meant by the idea of “what was here before”. Immediately the sense that places are places because of how human experiences converge there shifts. That convergence is many layered and many dimensional. The most obvious features suggest this convergence, such as the natural contours of land, the abundance of birds and wallabies, the junction of two part-flowing creeks, the same permanent shallow soak nearby. Of course this is where the original small township was built.

To understand the connectedness of human presence across time goes to the heart of that matter of how the words ‘country’ and ‘land’ and ‘countryside’ themselves connect up. In city people this knowledge of prior Aboriginal residency can readily inspire constructive action mixed with guilt, whereas a mixture of fellow feeling, resignation and responsibility is a much more likely emotion in country areas. Spoken or unspoken, these shadings of perception contribute to the fact that, whether they weekend, run tax write-off cattle, genuinely farm or have working vineyards, most of my neighbours see their tenure as temporary and, by their own lights, custodial.

The fact is that so much has happened in this bit of the country that Aboriginal historical presence can no longer by itself identify the full shape of the remembering here. That said, Aboriginal presence and absence create the play of terms, the dimensions of feeling, the endless repeatings and no less regular memory failures which build up this place as a place. Like everywhere in Australia, this patch of country is a surface which, studied closely, has been written over and over again. It has been written indeed with the sort of intensity which can lead you to lose sight of your recollection as to the first version or whether there ever was one — a feature not unlike revising a poem where the first drafts fragment and vanish in repeated re-workings.

In poetry what emerges are dazzling and utterly convincing leaps of thought best made when the images offer moments of convergence, insight and sensation. But country is not achievable or terminable in that way. Each bit of it is itself that moment of convergence. It is never “got right”. It has to be told and re-told in order to live. If it is not only writers and artists who do that telling and realising of country, their work has a profound relationship with it in the Australian tradition. This relationship is in part to do with the artist’s ability to articulate and make explicit contemporary ways of seeing and travelling in country. But more than this it is to do with how, expertly drawn into the fabric of language and imagination, country enters into unconscious and intuitive areas of the mind. Works Cited

Campbell, David. Collected Poems, ed.Leonie Kramer, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1989.
Hodgins, Philip. New Selected Poems, Sydney: Duffy & Snellgrove, 2000.
Murray, Les. Ethnic Radion, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1977.
—. The People’s Otherworld, Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1983.

Note on text
“You people try and dig little more deep/ you been diggin’ only white soil/ try and find he black soil inside.” Quoted in  Stephen Muecke, Reading the Country, Fremantle: Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1984, p.172.  The custodian’s name has not been included for reasons of respect to Aboriginal custom.